The Earth Dwellers

—staring at me.

U

The wheelbarrow rockets through the air, spi

I dive and duck just as the window explodes inwards, glass shrapnel raining all around, tinkling like crystal wind chimes. There’s a whoosh! and a whoomp! and a heavy crash as the barrow bashes into my door.

A scream. Laney.

A shout. My father.

A gunshot. Then another.

Covered in shimmering glass shards, I push to my feet, ignoring the spots of blood welling up from my skin. The wheelbarrow is on its side in the hall, having destroyed my bedroom door. I barely spot my sister’s bare foot as she climbs past and toward the staircase.

“Laney, no!” my mother shouts, clambering over the barrow after her. “Rhett, stay here,” she says through a mop of unkempt blond hair.

My entire family is ru

There’s a roar of agony from somewhere downstairs, another gunshot, and then my sister’s scream, a wail of fear and terror. Something snaps inside me and I can move again, charging through the opening, leaping over the barrow, rebounding off the wall, half-stumbling down the hall. I take a sharp left and bound down the steps two at a time.

A cool breeze hits me in the face, unimpeded by the front door, which is wide open and hanging awkwardly by a single hinge. To my left the couch is overturned, splinters of ceramic from a broken vase littering the wooden floorboards around it.

Where’s my family?

I glance into the yard, where the rosebush is nothing more than a glowing pile of ash. The moving, bright-eyed shadows are gone. Are they inside?

“Mom?” I say, surprised that my voice comes out more than a whisper. “Dad? Laney?”

No answer. Silence. Silence. And then…

A scream. Not inside—but somewhere else, down the street perhaps. Another house. Can’t worry about that now. Have to find my family.

I tiptoe into the living room, stubbing my bare toe on something hard. My father’s gun skitters away, clattering across the wood as more screams fill the night. Screams of terror and pain. Neighbors, friends…what’s happening?

I bend down and reach for the gun…

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice says from behind.

My heart skips a beat as I whirl around, instinctively taking a step away toward the tipped-over couch. Glowing orbs stare back at me, too bright to gaze at directly. I shield my eyes with a hand, trying to discern who or what is co

“You won’t need them anymore,” the eyes say.

I reverse another step, feel the gun against my heel.

I crouch down, being watched by the animal eyes the entire time. Blindly grab for the gun. It’s warm and soft. No. Doesn’t make sense. For a moment, I risk tearing my gaze from the black-cloaked menace standing before me.

I’m holding a small, dark-ski

“No,” I breathe. And again: “No.”

LaneyohLaneyohLaneyohnonononono!

She watches me with wide, white, unseeing eyes. Her neck is wet and glistening with spilled life.

Tears blooming like roses, I wail at the presence, at my sister’s body, at the empty room, my cries joining the screams and shouts that seem to be everywhere now. “What have you done?” I cry. I’m dreaming—oh please let this be a nightmare. Pinch myself. And again, harder. A groan gurgles from the back of my throat, a cry of rage and hurt.

I jump to my feet and charge the shadow, forgetting my father’s gun because I don’t need it, don’t need anything but my own two fists and unbridled anger.

I blink and it’s gone.

“You can’t fight me,” the voice says, behind me again, standing over my sister’s dead body. It’s a woman’s voice. I only now realize it.

“Get away from her,” I growl through my teeth.

A laugh. How could she be laughing when Laney is broken beneath her? She must be a demon; there’s no other answer. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. You and your family”—she points at the couch and it flips over as if it weighs no more than a feather, revealing the still bodies of my adopted parents—“are coming with me.”

They’re not moving, not breathing: dead like Laney. Just like before. Not again.

I clamp my eyes shut as a flash of pain sears through my skull.

I’m five years old, drinking a juice in the backseat. Watching a cartoon on the screen built into the back of the driver’s seat. My first adopted dad curses and I wait for my adopted mother to correct him like she usually does, but then she curses too, and the car is suddenly lurching to a stop and it feels like my body is trying to rip through my seatbelt. My head hits the video screen just as there’s a magnificent

CRASH!!!

and it’s like the car’s an accordion being played for money by one of the men down by the docks. There’s no space in the back and even less in the front and I’m crying and fiddling with the seatbelt—which WON’T COME OFF—and my parents aren’t moving.

When I open my eyes, they’re still there. My new family, the first one I’ve felt comfortable with in a long time, gone to a place I can’t follow. And the glowing eyes, too, still staring. I run at the she-demon, and this time she doesn’t vanish, and I hit her so hard, like I’m tackling Brent at football practice, but it’s like crashing headfirst into a stone wall. Her icy hands clamp around my throat and she picks me up like I’m not big for my age and five foot eleven and a hundred and fifty pounds. Like I’m the size of one of my sister’s dolls, which Laney will never play with again.

“Guess we’re doing this the hard way,” she says, and I can see her teeth, which are straight and white and in perfect little rows above and below her lips, not rotted and sharpened into fangs like I expected. She squeezes my throat and I can’t breathe and I’m surprised when I realize:

I don’t care.

Breathing doesn’t matter. The sharp rap of the heartbeat in my chest doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now that they’re gone.

And then something hits me, and at first I think it’s the demon, but we’re both flying backwards, and her grip loosens and she releases my neck. I crack the back of my head against the fireplace before slumping to the floor, very aware of the demon beside me. A flash of metal cuts through the darkness and she disappears, like before.

Three faces appear, each identical and framed by well-trimmed gray hair and webs of wrinkles. I shake my head and three faces become one.

“Mr. Hanover?” I say, glancing at the long sword he’s carrying in his left hand. Hastily, he shoves it into a loop on his belt.

“She’s gone,” he says, bending over and picking up my body as easily as the demon did.

“So are they,” I say through the tears and the wave of dizziness that assaults me, and he nods with sad eyes.

“The witching hour has begun,” he says, just before my vision fades and I lose consciousness.

Chapter Two

Two years later

I stop, drop and roll. It’s what every kid learns to do in school when the fireman comes in and talks to your class in second grade. Except that’s for fire.

And this isn’t exactly fire.

Blue lightning streaks over me, crackling into a moose head on the wall and jarring it loose. Singed and smoking, the giant, antlered hunter’s trophy swings back and forth and then falls.